In Washington, two U.S. officials said John Negroponte, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is expected to be the first U.S. ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq.

One of the officials said Negroponte, a favorite of Secretary of State Colin Powell, (wtf?) has been asked whether he would take the job. But no imminent announcement is expected from the White House, because President Bush and his aides do not want to turn U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer into a lame duck.

If nominated and confirmed, Negroponte would oversee what is expected to be one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world. He has held numerous top posts before, including ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan administration's covert war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

...Negroponte -- ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 -- was doing his best to make sure that news of torture, disappearances and killings by the U.S.-trained Honduran military didn't make it back to Congress or the American people, where it might discourage funding for the covert wars.

More than $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer money flowed to the Honduran military during the 1980s. The country served as the primary U.S. base for waging its clandestine wars against communism -- specifically in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The CIA trained and financed a Honduran army unit known as Battalion 316, which kidnapped and tortured hundreds of people. Negroponte denied knowing of the human rights violations though the abuses were widely publicized in the Honduran press. A CIA document declassified in 1998 and made available by the nonprofit National Security Archive, acknowledged that the Honduran military had committed abuses which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned.

"The focus of my efforts were in shoring up Honduras's own defenses," Negroponte said in a 1999 CNN interview. "So we worked on building up their military, and building their self-confidence. ... We served as a sort of rear area, if you will, on a modest scale for the efforts in El Salvador." Some 75,000 Salvadorans died in the civil war in that country.

Negroponte supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnaped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte's participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military and he claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post. When the Reagan administration came to power, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations.

Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras:

Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.

The Suns's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of numerous abuses but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensured that the embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story.